Finding a place of reflection, looking for meaning in the middle of life. Making sense of the past, deciding how to greet the future, all the while discovering more of who we are and who we are meant to be. A living, breathing memoir of sorts.

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

A few years ago, I began to notice
that a deepening of the lines beside my mouth, some call them marionette lines.
It seemed that every time I looked into the mirror my eyes gravitated to these
two lines that were absent in my youth.

I had heard one of the older ladies
at the gym talk about how she goes to a dermatologist every so often to get
injections of Juvederme injections. She laughed and said, “The doc keeps a vial
on hand for me, and a few shots of the stuff fixes me right up.”

She had to be at least ten years my
senior (you never ask how old a lady is). I looked at her face and decided that
she might be right. It wouldn’t hurt to try some of that stuff. After all, I
didn’t want to have a puppet face when I got married in a few weeks.

About a week before the wedding I
set up an appointment with a dermatologist in Douglasville near the school
where I worked. I had lunchtime planning, so I booked the appointment for then.
I could have the procedure then go back to school and teach my last class. I
would have plenty of time.

I told no one about my decision,
mainly because I wanted to see if anyone, including Dave, would notice my improved face. It
would be a true test of effectiveness. Besides, who wants to admit to such
vanity.

The doctor came in and explained the
procedure. I guess I had thought you would just stick the needle in and squirt
a little each side of my mouth. That was not the case. He numbed both sides and
then proceeded to make several injections up and down the lines shooting the
expensive vial of Juvederme into place. I looked at the half-full vial as he
switched from the right side to the left and thought, ‘Gosh there is still that
much left! Gym lady forgot to tell how much this junk hurts!’

Finally, I was finished and sent on
my way back to school. I flipped open my visor mirror to see the doctor’s
handiwork and gasped. My marionette lines had disappeared and were replaced
with considerable swelling and about twenty blood dots where the needle had
been inserted.

I had to go back to school. I had a
class starting in fifteen minutes. What was I going to do? I had thought to
bring some foundation with me as I thought I might need to reapply. I dabbed it
over the blood dots to no avail. Even after the third, cakey coat you could
still see the tiny scabs if you looked closely, and there was no help for the
swelling from the trauma of it all.

‘So much for no one knowing about my
vanity,’ I thought as I opened the hallway door. Classes were changing, and as
I patrolled the masses my two department heads, both women old enough to
understand, came up to me in the hallway.

One smiled and said, “We missed you
at lunch today.”

Feeling the need for a confession I
looked at them both and said, “Yeah, I went to the dermatologist, can you
tell?”

Neither one wanted to say, “Your
face is all swollen and what are those little red dots,” so they said nothing.
I continued, “I had injections to get rid of the lines beside my mouth. I had
no I idea I would look like this afterward, or I would have scheduled it for
after school. It looks bad doesn’t it?”

They both said no I looked fine, and
one added, “If I had the money I would get a face-lift in a minute.”

One thing is for sure that women of a
certain age come together in great understanding of anything anti-aging. As far
as the results, No one even noticed. Dave would have never known had I not told
him. My mom, a fellow anti-ager, couldn’t even tell that I had done it. My bank
account sure could. I was $575 poorer, and that was a fact.

I will say though that after the
swelling went down and the blood dots disappeared, my eyes didn’t focus on my
marionette lines anymore. They had something else to focus on. The crows feet
beside my eyes became more prominent as did the frown lines between my eyes. ‘I
wonder how much Botox costs?’

Thursday, April 19, 2018

I come from a long line of aging
avoiders, so it is inevitable that in the middle of my fifties my anti-aging
routine has hit an all-time high. Did I mention that anti-aging is a very expensive
regimen? Maintenance of a youthfulish appearance is costly. (Yes, I know that I
coined a new word, but youthful is never fully attainable.) There is gray hair coverage each month,
intensive moisturizers and makeups, a gym memberships, stylish clothing, vitamin
and herbal supplements, and replacement hormones to pay for. I figure a third
of my income goes to Denise’s youthfulish appearance maintenance.

Before you judge me as completely
superficial listen to how I acquired my behavior. I learned from the best. My
mother’s polished and perfect appearance always instilled a need to present my
best. Some of my earliest memories are of me watching her apply her makeup. She
would give me a drop of her Oil of Olay to rub on my face and let me play with
one of her tiny Avon lipstick samples. Her lifelong attempts to stop her aging
has worked pretty well. People have often thought we were sisters instead of
mother and daughter, but I guess my best inspiration came from my
great-grandmother, Ella Mae Pate. The following is an excerpt from my memoir, Leave Him?

The spring squealed a familiar sound as I flung open the screen door
of Grandma Hines’ house, and doing its job, slammed the wood of the door
against the frame with a loud pop. I ran past the kitchen table into the middle
bedroom just as I had done at least once a week since I could walk. My eyes
adjusted to the darker room to see a familiar sight, Grandma Pate was seated in
her gold, velour-covered chair next to the doorway. The corners of her mouth
turned up as I entered the room.

She addressed me from her throne of a chair where she spent
countless hours, most of them just looking across the room in front of her,
“Well hello. How are you doing today?”

I stopped to talk to her as I did every week, “Oh nothing much.
Just been reading a lot of books I got at the library. I am almost finished
with my twenty-five I need to complete for the summer reading program.”

She smiled at me, “That’s good!” She reached into her apron pocket
and pulled out her leather change purse. She twisted the latch and got out two
quarters. “I’ve been thinking that I have a job I want you to do. How’d you
like to earn 50 cents?”

Opportunities for a ten-year-old daughter of a laid-off Lockheed
aircraft worker to make money of her own didn’t come around often, so I
immediately said “Yes,” without knowing what I was saying yes to.

Grandma Pate reached over to her side table and picked up a pair
of tweezers, handed them to me, and said, “I want you to pull out the hairs on
my chin and my lip. I can’t see good enough anymore to do it myself.”

My ten-year-old brow furrowed together as I contemplated the task.
I thought about the big box of colors with the sharpener in the back of the box
that I could save up and buy with the money. Then I thought about how it would
hurt to have hairs pulled out of your face. I reached out and took the
tweezers.

She proceeded to instruct me, “Just hold them between your finger
and thumb, put the ends around the hair, then squeeze them tight and pull.”

I found a white hair about a half inch long on her chin and
surrounded it with the tweezer points, then stopped and looked at her green
eyes.

“Won’t it hurt? I don’t want to hurt you.”

She chuckled a bit and tried to explain. “Honey, when you’ve lived
as long as me a little thing like pulling out a hair don’t hurt. I don’t even
feel it. You are just doing me a favor.”

I steadied my hand again, squeezing the metal tweezers tight on
the white hair then pulled it towards me. As the hair came loose, I watched her
for a sign of pain, but her expression didn’t change.

“See, that wasn’t so bad was it? Now, do the rest and I’ll give
you your money.”

I looked at her eighty-seven-year-old face. It was a pale apricot
color with wrinkles that combined with her white hair to tell her age. I had
never had a reason to be this close and look at her like this before. I noticed
that her skin was soft as my fingers brushed up against it. As I pulled hair
after hair from her chin and her upper lip, I wondered why. Why would she want
these hairs gone enough to pay me to do it? I knew my mother spent countless hours
fixing her hair and putting on lipstick, but she did it for my daddy, or so
people would say she was pretty like they always did when we went places. But I
knew that Grandma Pate didn’t have a husband and hadn’t had one for most of her
life, and other than going out to eat on a Friday night and to church she
didn’t see anyone. I finished the last one and put the tweezers down.

“Did you get ‘em all?”

I nodded still in thought and looked at her smile at me and say,
“Well, I spect I look presentable now,” and as if she read my thoughts, “You
don’t just fix up for other people. Sometimes you fix up for yourself. Here’s
your pay. You did a good job. I’ll pay you to do this every couple of weeks,
okay?”

I
had a steady job for the next two years until she passed away. I suppose seeing
her fix herself up has a lot to do with why I go to the trouble that I do to
keep up my youthfulish appearance. Oh, and by the way, when I found a long
white hair sprouting from the right side of my chin the other day, I picked up
my tweezers and smiled.

Monday, April 9, 2018

Yesterday I had a problem. I couldn’t
find my shorts. I will admit that I have a pretty severe clothing addiction, so
you would think that one pair of shorts wouldn’t matter. I do own plenty of
shorts, but I only wear one pair, and they were missing. I spent hours looking
everywhere possible for my shorts to no avail. After searching behind the
dresser with a flashlight and washing every piece of laundry, I thought I would
have to give up the fight. They were gone.

My last-ditch effort was to confront
my husband, could he have possibly thrown my beloved shorts away? I do wear
them almost every day in the summer. Maybe he was tired of seeing the shorts
and did them in. My questioning began, “Babe, have you seen my missing shorts?
I think I need to put out an APB to find them. You haven’t seen them, have you?”

He said, “You mean the tan and white
ones?”

He knew which ones, making him look more
guilty. “Did you throw them away? I know you are probably sick of them, but they are the only ones that fit like they were made for me. Just
confess if you threw them out, so I can grieve and move on.”

He laughed a bit and said, “No, I
didn’t throw them out. I like the way you look in them,” and I told him that I had looked
everywhere I could think of.

As I went on about my day, I decided
I might have a problem. I worked on the quarterly chore that I dread with a
passion- changing my closet over from the winter selection to the spring. The
job entails sorting through waaaayyyy too many clothes and dragging them up the
stairs to store in a spare closet until next season, then bringing the spring (cooler-
but not the coolest clothing) down in exchange- then there are the boots to
store and swap for sandals and cute spring shoes.

I’m not sure which thing about the
task is the worst, lugging the heavy armloads up and down the stairs, or the
shame that I feel when I think about how much money I have wasted on clothing.
I haven’t always been a clothing hoarder. For many years, I didn’t have the
money to support my clothing habit. I could barely afford to clothe my kids. I
guess when I became able to treat myself to buying cute outfits, I got more than
a little carried away. As I haul them up and down, I remember each purchase. Oh
yeah, I bought that shirt at the mall in Douglasville, or I bought that one at
the Anniston TJ Maxx.

I sort them into categories, to
organize the closet to the best of my abilities, making a short sleeve casual
section arranged by color, then a work top section arranged by color, and
bottoms (skirts, capris, and pants) arranged by color, etc. As I grab each
hanger and decide which category they belong I realize something. Of all these
things that I haul up and down the stairs, there are only really a few that I
wear time and time again. They, like my missing shorts, suit me. The rest of
the items are only supplementary impostors pretending to be the clothes I care
for. If the impostors were to go missing, I’d probably not even notice, much
less grieve their loss.

Swimming in my guilt of excess, I decide
to change my evil ways. I vow to radically slow down my clothing purchases. I
think before I buy anything else I will ask myself if I really need it, try it on to
see if it is the perfect fit, and then gently talk to the article of clothing asking it if we are meant
to be. It is going to be hard, but I will practice clothing abstinence.

By the end of the day, my husband
came up to me with a smile on his face and a prize in his hands. “Look, what I
found behind the chair that I sort laundry on.” I hugged him tightly. He had
rescued my nearly eight-year-old shorts, and my grief lifted. The temporary
loss of my favorite shorts inspired a commitment to clothing abstinence. Now
every time I put them on I will be reminded that I have all I need! It's a good thing that I wear them almost every day, because I'm gonna need a lot of reminding!

About Me

I am currently in my third career as a high school English teacher in the small Georgia town that I grew up in. My first career was in journalism where I eventually started my own direct mail publication writing feature stories about businesses and a personal column, sharing insights into my life. After selling my paper, I embarked on my second career of spiritual counseling in an effort to find help for myself, and then to offer that help to others. I have learned much from life, but probably the most important thing is that people need to know that they are not alone in their struggles, and it is only by us daring to drop the mask of perfection and being real that we find true connection. This is my attempt to share my struggles, my failures, and my occasional triumphs to build a safe place to drop the masks we all wear and dare to be real.